Rick Stevens wrote:
The history is really much more complex than this. Wikipedia has a
nice graphic of how the open/commercial parts developed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix. But basically since the
government-regulated monopoly (AT&T) that did the initial work could
not sell it directly, they licensed it for research purposes to
universities where the original BSD additions were components that had
to be installed on top of the AT&T code.
I've known Wikipedia stuff to be wrong and part of this is. In the old
days, you couldn't call it "Unix" unless you had a source code license
from Bell Labs (not AT&T). I know, I was involved in the negotiations
our company had with BL to get System V source. They wanted, IIRC, $50K
in 1982. We said "too much, guys."
You could, however, get a license for BSD for a LOT less ($5k, I think),
and that's what a LOT of people did (including Sun, DEC, IBM, Data
General, Silicon Graphics and others too many to name).
This doesn't make much sense until the completion of the standalone BSD
that I thought happened a lot later. Originally you had to have an AT&T
license to run the BSD additions. And at these prices it's pretty easy
to see why everyone was running Windows a few years later - I still
blame AT&T for that.
Many companies DID use SVR4.2 as the base for later versions of their
OSes. Sun's Solaris (SunOS 5.x) is SVR4.2-based, whereas the original
SunOS (SunOS 4.x) was BSD-based. They renamed it Solaris to
differentiate it from the BSD-based earlier OS. DG's later versions of
their DG/UX was SVR4.2-based. The first PC-esque SVR4.2 I used was on a
(blast from the past) Amiga 2000 (Motorola 68020), followed by "E-NIX"
(from Everex Computers) on actual i386 hardware.
DEC got so pissed off at the Unix title owner that they went to OSF/1
(Mach-based) for the Alpha products (eventually called "Tru64") and
dropped BSD and SVR4.2 completely.
Sensible pricing could have changed everything. Dell had one of the
least expensive versions of SysVr4 that was still around $1k per box and
it was one of the few that would adapt to generic SCSI drives instead of
being limited to the vendor's set compiled into the kernel (like AT&T's
own retail version). It mysteriously disappeared right when Windows95
came out. Of course after the court revelations about Microsoft's
anti-competitive practices, it wasn't so mysterious.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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